ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges dominant discourses that frame online visibility through binary conceptions like public/private and surveillance/resistance, advancing a framework that positions visibility as an assemblage of relationships that emerges at the intersection of technological affordances, embodied experiences, and institutional agendas. Drawing on Goffman’s concept of ‘information games’, the chapter explores how digital environments transform the relational dynamics through which people strategically manage their self-presentation and social boundaries. The chapter goes on to explore what the everyday ‘visibility games’ played by influencers, activists, and teenagers can teach us about how people develop a ‘practical politics of visibility’—a situated understanding of what is ‘at stake’ in different configurations of watching and being watched. Five key dimensions of this ‘practical politics’ are identified: visibility is always occasioned, relational, embodied, and affective, generative of both value and values, and fundamentally heuristic (developed through ongoing experimentation). Rather than teaching students merely to protect their ‘data privacy’ through technical or behavioural solutions, the proposed pedagogical interventions invite learners to critically analyse how different visibility regimes create possibilities for connection, recognition, and political action alongside risks of exploitation, discrimination, and vulnerability.
